Another hearty note of approval here. I recall the first Spoiler point above making sense to me at the time, but it's now too long since my viewing for me to recall why. And I didn't know enough to be bothered by the second one. My own point of irritation was the script giving her a dead child; it seemed a cheap short-cut to Depth and Stakes and Recovering the WIll To Survive. And one blogger liked everything except her "thank you" at the very end. So we all have our points that bugged us, but nevertheless it's quite an achievement. It captures some of that feel of being in an environment very far from anything comforting or familiar or suited to our survival. I was lucky to catch it in 3D IMAX but it would be effective in any screening, I think -- but preferably in a theater, I'd guess, rather than at home.

I expected to be disappointed with Ender's Game because there is so much in the book that just couldn't be crammed into a 2-hour movie. But I liked it. Colonel Graff's role has been beefed up, to keep Harrison Ford happy, no doubt. But Asa Butterfield is the perfect Ender. He's intense, convincing, and a little scary. The kid is great. The visuals are terrific. It's an exciting movie.

Either the movie moves too fast or I'm getting too old, for I needed more time to assimilate what was happening before being plunged in to the next thing. That might be deliberate, to get us to go a second time to catch what we missed before. But Austin is right...it IS an exciting movie. Asa Butterfield is so RIGHT as Ender. I just may go back and see it again.

Ender was invented as an 8 year old who thought he was playing war games at his school. He was scary, yes, because he was willing to kill when he felt it needed doing, but originally, at least, he was conceived as not realizing just how his use of the war games was going to be used.

A lot of people are willing to hate the movie, however, just because Ender was conceived and originally written by Orson Scott Card, whom they execrate because of his positions on gays. He's a devout Mormon, how did they think he was going to feel about gays?

Pete, maybe that second sentence should have been put in Spoiler mode. But yes, it's exactly the same in the movie. The action had to be greatly constricted to cram as much of the book as possible into a two-hour movie length. As a result, there's very little sense of the passage of time (probably accounting for that too-fast quality Lorna mentioned). The final battle was definitely rushed; I think they missed the boat on that, settling for sparkly F/X instead of a step-by-step strategic attack. I don't quite understand the several references to Peter, Ender's older brother whose role was cut from the movie. Why mention him at all? Perhaps planting hints for a sequel?

But in the end, the success or failure of the movie rests squarely on the shoulders of the young actor playing Ender. Asa Butterfield met the challenge, no question of that; in fact, he carried the movie. The 16-year-old brought such intensity to the role -- the kid is a real presence on the screen. I believed him as Ender; everything else is secondary.

Oh...and Petra and Valentine look too much alike. I sincerely hope that was not intentional.

And I sincerely hope there is no sequel, as the off-to-new-adventures ending indicates. I didn't like that whole little coda that came after the final battle. As I recall, the book ended with Ender being sent home to his family on earth and placed under a sort of suicide watch. The burden of genocide would be heavy enough to make anyone want to end it all. That was the proper ending for that story. Anything else would be cheapening what happened, and that's what the movie did. But up to that point, I did enjoy seeing the story unfold, and I agree that Asa Butterfield made a great Ender Wiggins.

Card's sequel. Speaker for the Dead, had an adult Ender, some light years away from Earth. He hadn't aged during the FTL travel, but his siblings on Earth had, and were now much older than he. That's all I remember of the book.

Speaker was a disappointment, mostly because Card writes about children better than he writes about adults. He's done a few YA books, but he writes ABOUT children, not FOR children. And his fictional children are all superkids in one way or another. He wrote one short novel (the title escapes me) about a three-year-old surviving on the streets of Amsterdam. Utterly preposterous to think that a child barely past toddler stage could have the perception and resourcefulness to live and thrive on mean streets. But the story was engaging in the way Ender was engaging, so you go along with the unbelievable premise just for the pleasure of following the story. I understand Card's fantasy stories feature superkids as well, although I've not read any of them.